


Ichi

by arjache



Category: Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Genre: Gen, Trans, Trans Character, Trans Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-16
Updated: 2014-03-16
Packaged: 2018-01-16 00:10:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 5,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1324387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arjache/pseuds/arjache
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>Well, are you a boy?</em> </p><p>Strange that this would seem more surreal than anything else going on right now. </p><p>“No.” </p><p><em>Are you a girl, then? Or perhaps something else entirely?</em> </p><p>Masumi laughed, more from accumulated shock than amazement. “Why are you asking <em>me</em>?” </p><p>
  <em>Who else could answer, if not you?</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you, as always, to my wonderful beta readers.

Once upon a time, there lived two siblings, Masami and Masumi. 

The two were born on the same hour of the same day and had barely spent any time apart from each other since then. If they had been identical they would have been declared _ichiransei sōseiji_ , being practically as one: **_Ichi_**. But they were not entirely identical, being brother and sister, and so instead they were declared _niransei sōseiji_ \- not one, but two. **_Ni._**

In spite of their numerical distinction, the twins were very close, nigh unto inseparable. They shared their lives with one another - sharing the same toys, the same jokes, the same discoveries. The same stories they invented to amuse each other. The same victories and losses. The same secrets. The same golden hair. They even tried sharing the same clothes, for a time, until their parents raised a fit about it. They may have been declared two, but they were practically one. 

But as the years passed, even as they were closer than ever in mind and spirit, in body they began to grow apart; now they really were as two. They both took this as a great affront and tragedy, but Masumi took it especially badly. 

“I don’t like this. Why can’t I be a girl like you? It would be so much simpler.” Masumi said one night, near tears. “We don’t match any more. _I_ don’t match any more. I don’t even match my own body. There’s no room for me in here.” 

And, on that note, Masumi stormed out of the room. 

Masami said nothing, and for once did not follow her twin. Instead she sat there, deep in thought, for the rest of the evening. 

* * *

The next day Masami was smiling. “I have a new story to tell you. Would you like to hear it?” 

Masumi’s face brightened slightly at that, but soon slipped back into the gloom of the previous night. “What kind of story?” 

“It’s a fairy tale.” 

“Okay,” said Masumi. 

“Once upon a time,” Masami began - for all fairy tales must begin this way - “there was a mischievous, scheming imp, and a beautiful woman with straw-colored hair.” 

“Now, I’m sure you’ve heard the tale of Rumpelstiltskin. This is not that tale, and this was not that imp. But maybe they were kin. You see, just as the bride in that story was forced to make a dubious bargain with Rumpelstiltskin, trading her first-born child for the ability to turn straw into gold, so too did the bride of this story make her own bargain with an imp.” 

“The beautiful woman with the straw-colored hair was barren, you see. She could not have children, but she desperately wished for them to please her husband, and no folk magic had been able to provide her with them. But the imp, whose own power lay outside the realm of folk magic entirely, came to her and offered her a deal: The imp would work a miracle, and the woman with the straw-colored hair would have two children with golden hair; twin girls. _Ichiransei sōseiji._ ” 

“But there was a terrible price attached to this offer. In exchange, the woman would have to give up one of the girls to the imp once they had come of age.” 

“But that terrible price would not have to be paid for quite some time, and the woman was very desperate. And so she agreed.” 

“The twin girls arrived right on schedule, golden-haired and exactly as promised, and after giving birth their mother wept; not only out of amazement at the miracle of it all, but also out of regret, for she remembered the bargain she had wrought. At first sight she loved the twins, and could not bear the thought of parting with either, and so she hatched a scheme to save them both from the grief that was to follow her wish.” 

“She would work a spell of her own to disguise one of the girls as a boy.” 

“That way, you see, when the imp finally came back to collect on its contract, she could claim the children were outside the terms of the deal. The imp would get nothing, because it had promised identical twins, two golden girls from the same golden egg, but instead she had gotten fraternal twins, two mere straw-colored siblings. Not _ichiransei sōseiji,_ but _niransei sōseiji_.” 

Masami stopped there, smiling faintly. “Your turn,” she said. 

“You didn’t tell me it was a turn-taking story,” said Masumi, making a face, but clearly in better spirits than before. 

“Oh, but it is! You’re the only one who can say how it ends.” 

“Can’t you at least give me a hint? Surely you must have had something in mind.” 

“Wellll…there is one more thing I could say,” said Masami, and then paused for a moment, biting her lip. “If I were one of the twins in that story, and I found out that, despite being told for my whole life that I had a brother, I really had a sister…well, that’d be quite all right with me. No matter what, she would still be my dearest sibling, my twin, and I would love her all the same.” 

“What a lucky girl she must have been, to have such a wonderful sister,” said Masumi, and the two beamed at each other. “What a lucky girl indeed.” 

That night, they began plotting. 


	2. Chapter 2

Three months later, on the eve of the day Masumi planned to come out to her parents, a strange creature came to visit her. 

Masumi was sitting on a bench outside writing in her notebook when the creature approached. She thought that it might be a fox from the park nearby, but it was like no other fox she had seen before. 

For one thing, it was mostly white, with red eyes and pinkish bits here and there. Perhaps it was some sort of albino? 

And she had no idea _what_ was going on with those ears. 

It certainly didn’t behave like any fox she had seen before. Foxes are naturally inquisitive beings, of course, but this one transcended mere curiosity. It approached her, quietly, deliberately, and then sat and watched her from a safe distance. 

Masumi kept to her pen and paper, trying to figure out the right words to say to her parents about her newfound gender, but every now and then she would look up to find the fox’s eyes still staring at her. Every now and then it would notice her looking up, and raise a paw, as if it were about to say something - and then stop, and hesitantly put its paw back down, and go back to staring at her. 

_Hungrily._ That’s what it was doing. It was staring at her hungrily. More wolf than fox. 

Maybe this was a fox that had become too accustomed to humans, and was hoping for a treat. Yes. That must be it. 

“Hello, little one,” she said finally. “Are you hungry? I’m sorry, but I don’t have any treats for you. Maybe later.” 

The fox’s eyes shifted towards the notebook in her hands. 

“I’m afraid that wouldn’t taste very good,” Masumi said, giggling. She held up the notebook, and turned it to face the fox. “See? Just writing.” 

She suddenly felt very self-conscious about this action. It occurred to her that this fox was the first being she had shown this full written confession to. Panic filled her mind for a moment, and the notebook slipped from her hands and fell softly to the ground below. She stared at it. 

It occurred to her that she was worrying about possibly having outed herself to a fox. 

By all rights she should have scared the fox away, but now it seemed even more interested in her than before. It crept forward and sniffed at the notebook, the pages still open to her notes on coming out. The fox tilted its head, eyes ticking back and forth as if it were reading what she had written, until it noticed her watching it, at which point it stood up and walked away abruptly, its tail ticking out some sort of complex code known only to itself. 

“I didn’t think my handwriting was that bad,” Masumi said, sighing, and went back to her work. 


	3. Chapter 3

The next day, Masumi walked nervously into the living room, one hand clutching her notes on what to say, the other gripping her twin sister’s hand. 

“Mother? Father? There’s something I –” 

Masumi trailed off. She had been too worked up to notice that her parents were busily gathering up paperwork. 

“Later, dear. We’re running late for our appointment. Why don’t you two go ahead and get in the car?” 

Masumi hadn’t planned for such a nerve-wracking delay, but she let Masami guide her outside while her anxieties played themselves out in her head, her motions on auto-pilot. 

As they got into the backseat of the car, Masami squeezed her hand and whispered to her, “We’ll get through this together. No matter what happens, you’ll always be my sister.” 

And then their parents got in the car, a tense silence between them as if they had just been arguing about something. They drove and drove for what seemed like forever, the anxiety of her impending coming-out slowly settling, cold, into the pit of her stomach, and as the scenery outside the window slipped past her, Masumi drifted… 

* * *

Masumi jolted awake. She was sitting on the couch. Perhaps she’d dozed off there while waiting for her parents. 

The strange little fox from the park was there, sitting on the rug. It stared up expectantly at her, just as it had the day before. She stared back at it. 

It occurred to her that they had already left the house a while ago. 

How had she gotten back here? 

_You’re confused, aren’t you? Let me explain,_ said the fox. It somehow did so without moving its mouth. _This is only a convenient setting drawn from your own mind. We have things to discuss, and this seemed less distracting than your actual situation at the moment._

The fox was talking to her. For some reason it seemed perfectly natural that the fox was talking to her. From the instant she had heard its voice, she could not imagine any other way it ought to be. 

“My…actual situation?”, Masumi asked. 

The air shimmered. The room faded away. And then the air started shimmering again, but this time from heat… 

Pain. So much pain. Waves of it. The groan of twisted metal. The smell of blood lurking under the overwhelming, suffocating presence of smoke in the air. 

And then it all stopped again, and the room returned. 

“I was in the backseat of the car.” 

_You still are,_ said the fox, licking a paw delicately and looking supremely unconcerned. _And you will not last long in your current condition. I’ve taken the liberty of speeding up your perception of time so that we might converse for a while._

“There was an accident.” 

_Yes._

“My parents - my sister -“ 

_Dead._

“Oh god.” Masumi shook back and forth on the couch. Except it wasn’t a couch, but that hardly seemed important now. Or was it? People were supposed to hallucinate things like this when near death, right? That must be what was happening now. And that must be why the fox was speaking to her: It was part of her hallucination; the memory of it was still fresh in her mind from yesterday. 

But if it was an hallucination, then maybe they weren’t actually dead. Maybe -

_Were you close?_

“What?” 

_I have noticed that human family members often share very close emotional bonds, and that to lose them in some fashion can cause an inordinate amount of grief. It stands to reason that you might also be experiencing that right now._

“I - my - yes, we’re very close. My sister especially.” 

Not crying yet. Perhaps that would come later. 

Masami couldn’t be dead. Couldn’t be. 

Could she? 

_You and she were born at the same time._

“We’re twins.” 

There should have been tears by now. Was it just not possible to cry during a near-death experience? Something about the adrenaline? 

_We’re getting off topic. I have an offer to make you._

Masumi heard the words but didn’t register them. “She can’t be dead,“ she said, echoing her thoight from earlier, the one that kept running through her mind in a never-ending loop. ”I was just talking to her. And my parents. I was going to tell them about me. I was going to tell them-“ 

_Do you want to die?_

Masumi slumped. Finally, very quietly, “…no?” 

_Your injuries are very severe. You are near death. But you have within you the potential for a different fate. I am offering you the chance to awaken that potential._

“I don’t understand.” 

_I can grant you a wish if you make a contract with me. In exchange for the wish, you would agree to become a magical girl and fight witches._

“A magical…girl?” 

_You sound surprised. You are a girl, are you not? I’ve seen you refer to yourself in that way, so I’m not sure why you would find it unusual to hear yourself referred to as female in the same manner._

“I…” Masumi trailed off, the word echoing in her ears. “I hadn’t told anyone else. Just my sister. Everyone else thinks I’m a boy.” 

_Well, are you a boy?_

Strange that this would seem more surreal than anything else going on right now. 

“No.” 

_Are you a girl, then? Or perhaps something else entirely?_

Masumi laughed, more from accumulated shock than amazement. “Why are you asking _me_?” 

_Who else could answer, if not you?_

**_You’re the only one who can say how it ends._** Masami’s words rang through her head, spurring her on. 

“I am a girl,” Masumi whispered. 

_Well then, there’s no trouble, is there? Just think of a wish. In your case, it should be obvious._

“Any wish at all? Could I wish it so that this never happened? Bring my family back? So that we all live? Please.” 

_That is not a wish I can grant you within the confines of your own unique potential. There is still a chance for you. But not for them._

She lowered her head. “But I could wish to survive this.” 

_Yes._

Masumi stared at the floor for a long time. “It’s funny. Before today, if you had shown up and offered me a wish…well, it would have been obvious, wouldn’t it? I’d have wished that I could just be a girl. Both in terms of my day to day life, and in terms of my body. I’d have wished to fix my body, if nothing else. But I guess that’s no longer a wish I can afford to make,” she said. 

The fox seemed to smile smugly at this, though its face was just as expressionless as before. 

“What?” Masumi asked, annoyed. 

_If it’s just a matter of your body we can fix that anyway! Your body is very badly damaged at the moment. It would need to be reconstructed in any event, if you are to be of any use in fulfilling your contract. I could simply arrange for it to be constructed differently - in the shape that is conventionally designated ‘female’ by your species._

Her heart leapt to hear that, but she didn’t dare acknowledge it. She was probably still hallucinating. She couldn’t bear the thought of hoping for something so wondrous and then losing it upon waking up. 

If she ever woke up again. 

And yet, this dream state seemed so insistent that she could…. 

“You could…you could really do that?” she asked quietly. 

The fox nodded. _You should be grateful! Not many magical girls get to have two wishes fulfilled for the price of one._

“Two…” she muttered. “Two and one.” Her head was starting to hurt again. She supposed that meant she was running out of time to make a decision. 

_What is your answer?_

She looked back up at the strange creature. “Do it. All of what you just said. Make me a magical girl; fix my body to match. I wish to live on.” 

And then the world was once again a haze of pain, and a blinding light filled her eyes. 

…was this the end of the tunnel, then? 


	4. Chapter 4

The bright light. It hurt. 

Was the light at the end of the tunnel supposed to hurt? 

Someone was shouting. 

“I think this one’s alive!” 

Her eyes fluttered open. Chaos all around her. Someone was shining a bright light into her eyes. 

“Do you know where you are? Can you tell us your name?” 

She got as far as “Tomoe Ma-“ before she passed out again. 

* * *

She woke up in a hospital bed. A nurse stood nearby, checking her vitals. 

“…hospital?” she whispered. Her throat hurt too much to say more than a word or two at a time. She wondered if the doctors had put a tube in her throat at some point like she’d seen on television. 

“Ah, Tomoe-San, you’re awake,” said the nurse, turning to greet her. “How do you feel?” 

She coughed. “Sore. What happened?” 

“You’ve been in an accident. I’ll let the doctor explain it -“, the nurse tapped an intercom button. “Doctor? Tomoe Masami is awake.” 

“Masumi,” said Masumi, correcting out of habit. The nurse turned to look at her. 

“Masumi? Oh, your brother. He…I should really let the doctor explain that too.” 

Brother? 

* * *

An hour later, the fox reappeared. She ignored it and kept staring out the window. It curled up beside her, undeterred. 

“My family is dead,” she announced, but did not look down. 

_And you are not. Your body repaired to your new specifications._

“I noticed.” 

_You don’t sound entirely pleased._

“It’s a lot to take in.” 

_I suppose so. Will you be staying here much longer? We have much to discuss._

“They want me to stay in the hospital another night for observation, but that’s it. Apparently I made it through the accident “miraculously unscathed.” 

_Miraculous is the right word for it._

She looked down at her companion for the first time since it had reappeared. 

“They think I’m my sister! They think I’m dead!” she hissed. 

_Oh. I see. Can’t you correct them?_

“No! What am I going to tell them? ‘Hello, I’m actually Masumi, I just look different now because I magically transformed in the crash’? They wouldn’t believe me if I told them the truth. They’d think I’d just gone mad from grief or hit my head in the accident or something!” 

_It never ceases to amaze me how much effort you humans feel compelled to make to conceal the simplest of facts from your peers._

“Tell me about it,” she sighed, resting her head on her arms and staring out the window again. 

**_Ichi._**

* * *

Getting out of the hospital was a fairly simple matter. 

Getting through the funeral and the meeting with the family lawyer was rather more difficult. 

All she really had to do for the wake was show up. Everything was taken care of already by the family estate planner. Few people showed up. She had no extended family to grieve the loss of her immediate one. There were a handful of family friends and business associates, but that was it. 

Just showing up though was hard enough. She sat there, as much on display as the closed caskets; the dutiful daughter in mourning. She sat there in her black dress and thought of past days spent in silent longing, imagining a day when she could wear a dress and not get in trouble for it. 

This was not how she had envisioned it. 

She sat there and watched the guests mourn the person they thought was her. They mourned the living and the dead stayed forgotten. Her sister would never get a proper burial under her own name. How was that just? All she had wanted to do was to claim her own gender, and now here her sister was denied her own. And there was nothing she could do to fix that. All she could do was continue on in her sister’s profound absence. 

The spaces in between the funeral events were a blur of legal documents. Her parents, knowing their lack of relatives might put their children in a tight spot some day, had seen to it that she did not end up in an orphanage or in the foster system. Instead, the family servants would stay on to care for her, with the family lawyer acting as her legal guardian in most matters. She would remain in the house she had grown up in. 

And so there she sat a week later; on the couch and staring down at the living room rug, at her newfound companion. Back to where it had all started, in a sense. 

Said companion was pestering her to get started with her training as a magical girl, but her mind kept wandering to far more mundane concerns. How was she supposed to attend school in this state? She had no way to explain herself to her friends, and no desire to desecrate her sister’s memory by claiming Masami’s friends as her own. 

It occurred to her that those people were lost to her too. She really had lost everybody. 

_Almost everybody_ , she thought resentfully, glaring down at the little fox, whose eyes still looked hungry. 

She would not return to school, she decided. It would not be unheard of for a child in mourning to study privately for the remainder of the year. She could do that, and then move on to a new school somewhere else next year. A school where no one would recognize her, or have reason to question her history. A school where there would be no inconvenient memories to deal with, neither hers nor theirs. 

And in the meantime she would train as a magical girl, for lack of a better thing to occupy her. Perhaps it would offer her some distance from her grief. 


	5. Chapter 5

The worst part - or at least, worst after all the other horrible things that had happened thus far - but the worst part after that, Masumi thought, was the way everyone kept calling her Masami. 

It was all over the documents the family lawyer kept asking her to sign, for one. She felt very odd about that, signing someone else’s name to those documents. That hardly seemed right at all. 

She supposed she could try to change it. Or at least bring up the possibility with the aforementioned family lawyer, the next time they met. Assuming her caretakers let her change it. Assuming she could somehow justify it to them, persuade them to let her, still a minor, change it for reasons she could barely even elucidate to herself. 

Or, more realistically, for reasons consisting of whatever half-truths she thought her lawyer might consider more acceptable. 

But even if she managed that, even if she came up with a reason that sounded plausible, yet still superficially semblant of her actual motivations for doing so…the question still remained, change it to what? Her birth name, inoffensively gender-neutral though it may have been, was now effectively her dead name. Tomoe Masumi was legally dead. How do you recover your name from something like that? She didn’t think it was possible. So she needed a new name. 

She needed a new name and she had no idea how to go about finding one, let alone getting anyone else to call her it. 

She - privately, mind you - spent a week trying on names like so many articles of clothing. She dug through baby name databases, census records by birth year, even, briefly, a list of her favorite fictional characters. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. Was this truly how names got chosen? The concept of choosing one’s own name seemed so alien to her. Everything just drew her further out of the process; instead of relishing the experience it just made her feel like it was all some sort of meaningless game, as if every minute she spent on the experience only further lowered her credibility. Which just made her feel even more self-conscious about choosing a name. Back and forth in a vicious circle of authenticity. 

She understood how other people in her position might be inclined to hate their old name. But she had fond memories of hers. It had meant something more than just a name for the son her parents had thought they had had, versus the daughter she turned out to be. It represented an important connection. And even though that connection was gone now, she didn’t think she could just jettison this…remnant of it, this fragment of her past, quite so cavalierly. She still wanted that connection. A reminder of what she had lost. What price she had paid. 

A fragment. Something lost. 

Two siblings separated by a single syllable; now only she remained. The outside world could no longer distinguish between her and her sister. So what if she changed her name to reflect that new reality? 

Just drop the distinction. No longer Masumi-presumed-Masami. Just….Mami. 

Tomoe Mami. 

She could handle that. It was a name that encompassed her past as well as her present. A name that she had come to both by happenstance and by choice. A name with a story behind it. Her story. Mami’s story. 

Tomoe Mami. 

Okay then. 


	6. Chapter 6

She began to wonder when exactly she had started to view families with a sense of abject horror. 

It was the little things that got to her. She encountered them on the train, in the grocery store, at the park. And she stared at them, and saw their potential fates stretching out in front of them. All the little stories that were no longer an option for her. Possibilities precluded, pasts and futures denied this time around… 

Look at the young presumed-girl in front of her on the train, sitting with her mother and father and presumed-brother. Look at the hole in her own life where there used to be a mother, a father, a sibling. Look at how it had begun to scar over. Would it begin to slip away from her, this remembrance of how it once had been? Would the very concept of mothers and fathers and siblings become alien to her over time? Would she even be human at that point? 

Was she even human now? 

Look at the presumed-girl, wonder what her future might bring. Wonder what it must be like to grow up as a girl in a family, as a girl _with_ a family. She had no idea, but it pained her to glimpse what might have been. 

Look at the presumed-boy, wonder what his future might bring. Wonder if the presumed-boy is even a boy at all. Wince, briefly, at the pain that would surely lie in wait for this hypothetical girl. 

Look at her, mourning girls who might not even exist. 

Look at her, mourning a sister who might as well have never existed either. 

Look at her, mourning the little girl that no one but her sister ever got to know. 

On the good days she managed to ignore the families around her. On the bad days they were practically all she could see. If there were a happy medium between these two extremes, she had yet to find it. 


	7. Chapter 7

It was the day before Mami was to move to Mitakihara. She felt as if she should be doing something, but it wasn’t clear what. Everything was packed; everything was ready. 

She stepped out of the empty house; started walking. She wasn’t sure where she was walking. She didn’t need to patrol for witches for a while. This was different. She was just…walking. 

She had her phone with her, and headphones in her purse, and she slipped them on. She was about to just shuffle through the music at random, but her finger lingered over a particular playlist. “For my sister.” It wasn’t one she recognized. 

She flipped through the tracks, and then paused in astonishment. 

This wasn’t her playlist at all. Masami must have snuck it onto her phone when she wasn’t looking. Before she - before she… 

Mami hit play. 

It was as if a part of her that had been dead inside suddenly came back to life. Emotions flooding in. All that cold frozen grief melting and pouring out as tears. 

She walked, and listened to that one last surprise her beloved twin had left for her. She walked, and walked, and walked. She walked past her usual patrol route altogether - through which muscle memory had initially guided her - and on beyond it, past the houses, past the businesses, until she reached a wooded area, and within it, a clearing surrounded by trees. 

She sat there, then, and as the playlist slowly came to a close, she took off her headphones and looked up at the sky through the tree branches. 

“I miss you,” she said, blinking back tears. “I miss you and I don’t know what to say to you now other than that. But I…I want to thank you. Thank you for this wonderful gift. Thank you for believing in me. For being there for me before anyone else knew.” 

She paused for a moment. “And I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. You didn’t deserve this. I want to honor your memory but I don’t know how. And I can’t stay here any more. There’s too much of the past here to have a future. So I’m moving on. But I will always remember growing up here with you. I will always remember you.” 

She held her hand to her heart; held it out to the sky. “I won’t ever forget you.” 


	8. Chapter 8

So she moved, and found that while the distance dulled the pain, it somehow made it worse as well. Just different. Transformed. Into a dull ache that kept her up at night. A reminder of all she had lost. 

She wondered if she would some day lose even that. 

She moved, but she did not move on. 

She patrolled this new city, learned its secrets, listened to what it whispered to ears that had long since learned to filter it out, but she did not move on. 

She enrolled in a new school, met her classmates, wondered in amazement at all the little things that she didn’t yet know how to take for granted, this new experience of attending school and having everyone acknowledge her as the girl she was, but she did not move on. 

She moved forward. 

But she did not move on. 

Then, one day, months later, she met another girl like herself. 

* * *

The night air was chilly and Mami had left her coat in the house. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t ready to go back in yet. She was pretty sure she was about to cry. She really didn’t want to cry in front of her kōhai’s family. So she was out here instead. Waiting. Though for what she wasn’t sure. Waiting to be okay again? Waiting for it to be time for her to leave? Waiting to cry? 

Well, okay, _now_ she was crying, so at least she had that one covered. 

The door jangled behind her. Her ears, sensitive ever since the cr- _since she had contracted_ , told her it was Sakura-san. She didn’t bother turning around. 

“Hey, uh…are you okay?” Sakura-san asked. “You looked like you were about to puke or something.” 

“Just preoccupied,” Mami said. She thought about leaving it at that. Decided against it. “No…that’s not right. I thought I could handle meeting your family. I guess I couldn’t. I’m sorry.” Her eyes stung from the salt and the cold air. 

“You don’t need to apologize,” Sakura-san said. “Also, you’re shivering.” 

“Am I? It doesn’t matter. I should have been cold a long time ago. Instead this body is possessed of an unnatural heat.” 

Warmth, then, as her kōhai wrapped her arms around her. 

“I’m not going to let you go cold,” Sakura-san said. “You’re always trying to help people. Let me help you this time.” 

Mami stood there, slowly breathing, listening to the quiet inner chiming sensation that meant her soul gem was reacting to the presence of Sakura-san’s own gem. Resonating with each other. It wasn’t as noticeable as it had used to be. She wasn’t sure if that was because because over time the two crystals had slowly come to oscillate in unison with each other, or if she was taking Sakura-san’s presence for granted. 

She didn’t like the idea of taking anyone for granted any more. 

“I wish I could forget them, sometimes,” she said, reaching up and gripping Sakura-san’s arms, arms which were still around her. “But it feels like such a selfish thing to want. How could I forget any of them? How could I forget her? I…I have to carry her memory around, carry it within me, remember her, because no one else will at this rate. She was a real living person, and now she only exists in my head. She’s dead and I can’t even tell anyone she’s dead, because when they look at me they see her. When I look at myself I see her. Does that make me the ghost?” 

“It makes you a survivor,” Sakura-san said, “which is pretty much the textbook opposite definition of a ghost. Definitely not selfish, either. You’re one of the least selfish people I know.” 

“I made a selfish wish. I didn’t save them,” Mami whispered. “You saved yours.” 

“You _couldn’t_ save them. You made the only wish you were allowed to make. That’s hardly a wish at all.” 

“I guess…” 

“No, listen to me,” Sakura-san said, tugging on Mami to face her. Mami turned and looked at her, their arms dropping to their sides. “What matters most is that we are honest about our intentions. Don’t misconstrue your wish like that. You did what you could. I did what I could. We don’t all get to save who we want.” 

Mami reached out then and found Sakura-san’s hands next to hers; grasping them, she pressed close, their heads resting together. 

And the two of them stood there, then, a single pillar of fire in a desert of cold. Mami desperately wanted this moment to go on and on; to just stand there until they forgot why they were out there in the first place. To just be this close to another person without any other concerns, to just be so close to someone so very much like herself. Two people as one; echoing into infinity. 

Her reverie was interrupted by the slam of a door. “Mamaaaaa! Big brother has a girrrrrllllfriiiiiend!” 

“Um,” Sakura-san said. “I guess I should go back inside.” 

“I’ll join you,” Mami said, smiling gently. 

“Are you going to be okay?” 

“No,” she said, quietly. “Not really. But I think right now…I’d rather be in there with you than out here alone.” She squeezed Sakura-san’s hands. “Come on. They’ll tease you less if I’m there with you.” 

“But then they’ll tease me more later,” Sakura-san said, pouting for effect. 

“One problem at a time.”


End file.
